10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning

Portland State University PDXScholar World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations World Languages and Literatures 4-15-2009 10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning Ravi Purushotma Steven L. horne Portland State University Julian Wheatley Let us know how access to this document beneits you. Follow this and additional works at: htp://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/wll_fac Part of the First and Second Language Acquisition Commons, and the Science and Technology Studies Commons Citation Details Purushotma, R., horne, S. L., & Wheatly, J. (2009). 10 Key Principles for Designing Video Games for Foreign Language Learning. his Working Paper is brought to you for free and open access. It has been accepted for inclusion in World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of PDXScholar. For more information, please contact pdxscholar@pdx.edu. Different 7fh.e SBiil!fllf/! B A x x x x x x : t+ . x 0 I ti I x I The students' task is to find out, without looking at the partner's list, which items on the two lists are identical and which are only similar. They can only do this by questioning or commenting in the target language. Thus, the overt purpose of the lesson is not "to study the use of copular verb constructions," but rather "to compare and identify discrepancies between the objects that you see and those that your partner sees." To do so, of course, students will in fact have to make use of copular verb constructions, but they will craft the interrogation in their own terms. If they have not fully internalized the linguistic material that they need, they can look to their partner for help, or failing that, seek help from their teacher. Thus, the traditional grammatical and lexical underpinnings are still taught, but they are embedded within a task where their relevance is apparent and where they can be associated with actual situations. While there seems to be a fair degree of consensus among language theorists and teachers about the benefits of incorporating Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) in the curriculum, actually applying it to the classroom setting is still in early stages of development. But even now, it is possible to conceive of a number of ways to enhance student engagement in task-based activities. These include: (1) finding ways to introduce more complex narrative structure to the task; (2) adding elements of play; and (3) increasing players to use language. Then, having established a communicative point of view because they are need for language use, the next step is to provide players with support that allo\IVS them to navigate the game interface and learn whatever language concepts they need to complete the task at hand (see principle #3 & #4 for examples). Finally, the player needs to be provided with creative feedback mechanisms that will allow them to improve their performance. Through this cycle of need, support and creative feedback, we can effectively embed language pedagogy in a larger meaning-centered framework. the most direct embodiment of a speaker's In order to meet lower production budgets and avoid creative challenges, the greatest temptation for language game designers is to focus on words, either as spellings, without any attention to meaning, or as dictionary entries, without any attention to contexts of use. For example, a game like hangman could easily communicative intentions" (Tomasello, 2003: 325-6). As the early 20th century linguist Volosinov described it, language characterized as a system of normative forms is a scientific abstraction (1973: 98); rather, it is "solely through the utterance [or use] that language makes contact with communication, is imbued with its vital power, and becomes a reality" (1973: 123). Especially in foreign language development, there is a case to be made for a focus on what actual people actually do - the process-ontology of human communicative acts and processes that non-meaning (i.e., grammar and structure based) approaches inadequately acknowledge (see Thorne & Lantolf, 2007). To better be produced for an entire dictionary worth of words, as integrate form and meaning within a usagethe game only requires entering the spelling of each based understanding of language word and not its actual meaning. Similarly, games such development, we suggest adopting a language as crosswords, that focus on the spelling (or sound) awareness framework that emphasizes having and dictionary definition of individual words, fail to give learners/communicators gain understandings of the learner the contexts she needs to determine how the implications of language form as it relates the word is used. So, a game that merely teaches to the production of meaning and social students the words "the", "durian", "eaten" and "was" actions. Within a language awareness must be seen by those evaluating learning games as framework, meaning and form are bound up being vastly inferior to a game that can support together as a holism. Language structure students in learning to differentiate between "The (lexical choice, morphology, syntax) is what durian was eaten.", "Was the durian eaten?", "Eat the produces meaning, and the goal is to enhance durian!", "Pedro ate the durian." and "The durian ate learners' capacities to leverage discrete Pedro." Furthermore, such a game should in-turn be linguistic elements to carry out informationalseen as inferior to a game that teach learners to semantic and pragmatic actions (for a differentiate between utterances - language discussion, see McCarthy & Carter, 1994; produced for a purpose (or in other words, language Thorne, Reinhardt, & Golombek, 2008). in a context), such as: Question: "What about this one [Durian]? I Response: Hmm, about right, I think; take a whiff." #3 All elements of the game, particularly communication and input mechanisms, should have a playful spirit to them If we place meaning-focused activities at the center of a language learning game, one of the most instantly visible challenges is designing an effective user-interface and input mechanism. When activities take place in a classroom, students simply use their voices to talk to one another or their teacher as their primary means of interacting and completing the tasks. In computer systems, the use of speech recognition is still in its infancy, and video games based on it have proved overly ambitious (Lifeline, 2004 ). Having students type out full sentence responses is, naturally, too slow and cumbersome for use could draw from a corpus (i.e., collection of texts that can be computationally analyzed) of naturally occurring communication that would provide real-world examples of present, past, perfect and pastperfect tenses in indicative, conditional and other relevant moods, so that they can find ways for each to be encountered within the game. However, the systems used by designers to organize learning concepts is often not the most useful structure for learners. It is generally not necessary - or desirable - to place such metalinguistic information as central feature of the game; nor should the game require players to name the grammatical categories and other metalingusitic concepts in order to make progress in the game, so long as they are able to use them successfully. In fact, many of the best selling language learning titles {like Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone) take the extreme position of forgoing any mention of metalinguistic terms at all. Just how much metalingusitic description and other forms of explicit instruction should be provided in traditional classroom language learning environments remains controversial. Some students find it helpful; others find it more confusing than useful. Similarly, language acquisition theorists have wide ranging disagreements as to how, or even if, explicit metadescriptive instruction is useful in the overall language learning processes. In light of these doubts, researchers tend to agree that, while some conceptually oriented explicit instruction is likely to be useful (see related sidebar for discussion), the primary goal and orientation of the orthodox language curriculum should be to create conditions where discrete linguistic elements play a salient role in meaningful communication, which in turn raises awareness of language form as a resource for carrying out goal-directed actions (Ellis, 2005; Schmitt, 1990; Lantolf & Thorne, 2007: 218) A classroom teacher planning a lesson has to decide Theoretical Con side rations Many learners appreciate (and expect) explicit assistance at the level of discrete point much time to give students to practice and grammar and lexical options. Conventional proceduralize kno\Nledge (e.g., DeKeyser, 2007). grammatical and lexical aids can be Rather than struggling with the same dilemma, incorporated as 'help' features but should not designers of interactive systems can and should offer intrude on the action sequences that govern, options that adapt to an individual learner's and make enjoyable, in-game play. Where preferences and challenges. In the light of research possible, it would be useful to include, among findings about meaning-focused and form-focused ancillary language help features, a variety of instruction, a three-tiered approach to presenting new treatments that address the conceptual language concepts within a video game would seem to structuring of the world through the target be most effective: at the top level, a player's initial language in question. By this, we mean to interaction with the game would focus entirely on trying suggest that how tense and aspect function in to accomplish a task, without presentation of a given language to represent events, or how corresponding linguistic terminology, categories, or agency is variably constructed through active analysis. Players who have already managed to or passive voice, or how determiners (in master the relevant language elements can proceed English) explicitly mark a nominal item as to the next stage. directly referenced or generically indexed, offer how much time to give to explicit instruction (i.e., declarative kno\Nledge about language) and how If players do not succeed simply by focusing on the tasks, they can move to a second layer that allovvs them to consider the language that they have been using in new ways, but that still eschevvs full grammatical presentation. As described in principle #3, this can be achieved through a variety of mechanisms that take advantage of the multimedia potential contributions to the longer process of advanced language proficiency. Grammatical resources are, after all, tools to be used to achieve specific and nuanced social action and form a symbolic medium through which to construct the world in particular ways. In addition to the brief examples above, capabilities of a gaming environment. Finally, as a conceptual material relevant to games that third tier, students should be able to click on or require communication with other players (or otherwise interact with the system in order to receive non-player characters) could involve vvhatever explicit grammatical instruction they still need pragmatics, defined as "the study of speaker to understand the forms being highlighted. This third and hearer meaning created in their joint tier would include extensive explanations of grammar actions that include both linguistic and terms and language structure. Due to the fact that this nonlinguistic signals in the context of tier is available from, but also separate from, the socioculturally organized activities" (Locastro, spaces of actual gameply, it should be as detailed and 2003: 15). Pragmatic norms relating to comprehensive as necessary without worry of requests and apologies, for example, differ displacing or interfering with the primary arena of task- greatly across languages and speech based interaction. communities, with a primary distinction being on vvhether utterances are hearer-oriented ("could For example, imagine you are a curricular designer you hand me that book please?") or speakerlooking through a list of grammatical concepts you oriented ("may I have that book please?"). In a wish to teach and you realize you need to include a recent study involving American native lesson on auxiliary verb preposing, of the sort that speakers of English and Mexican native occurs in English questions. Whereas 80 years ago, speakers of Spanish, the Spanish group you might have simply entitled the lesson demonstrated a marked preference (87%) for "auxiliary verb preposing", today you would tell hearer-oriented requests (e.g., Medas un students they are to imagine themselves as police cafe.) and the English-speakers demonstrated interrogators trying to get key information from a a marked preference {90%) for speakerprisoner. Conducting such an interrogation effectively oriented strategies ("can I see your notes?") will, as a matter of course, give rise to questions that (Pinto, 2005, cited in Sykes, 2008). Explicit illustrate auxiliary verb preposing, so the subject presentation of such preference systems would matter need not be examined explicitly right away. enable learners to generate utterances "on the Class activities, such as prisoner interrogation, that fly" that might align more closely with native are common in task-based language classrooms, have speaker pragmatic norms. very natural connections to existing entertainment video game models (e.g. Phoenix Wright). Students vvho have mastered auxiliary verb preposing and other relevant concepts would be allowed to continue with the interrogation with no further pedagogical intervention. Students vvho need support, however, would be able to receive visual or other inferential cues to help them understand the linguistic forms they need. Placing a question mark at the end of a sentence, for example, could cause the question mark and the auxiliary verb to change color and a shadow image of the auxiliary verb to animate its way to the correct position at the head of the sentence. Students vvho find this level of support (focuson-form without explicit metalinguistic description) helpful enough can proceed with the interrogation. If not, they would be able to access a final level of meta-linguistic support that deals with the notion of "auxiliary verb" and its role in question formation. #5 Learning content should be organized around tasks, not presented taxonomically Along with grammatical notions, game designers might also feel it useful to keep track of the sequencing of concepts that is found in traditional curriculum design. For example, one might plan the following learning objectives: Vocabulary Goals Grammar Goals Level 4 Colors Question Formation Level 5 Food and Drink Negation Level 6 Relative Clauses Parts of the Body This would ensure that a broad range of language concepts is covered in a game. However, arbitrary taxonomical sequencing, such as the one shown above, presents a number of problems for language acquisition.Across cultures, this may not be the best way of sequencing material for human memory systems (Anderson, et. al 1994 ); and Vercoe (2006) argues it to be particularly problematical for Asian cultures: Research has shown that if language is instructed via relationships there are greater opportunities for vocabulary retention (Nation, 2000). At present, for example, when students encounter colours in English textbooks they are often taught all at one time, a wonderful taxonomical grouping. It should come as no surprise that days after instruction students sort-of know that "red" is a "colour" and "green" is a "colour" but which colour is red and which is green is hard to remember. By the instruction of one colour and another noun with a relationship "Green frogs live in a river," there is a far greater chance that students will retain the vocabulary (Nation, 2000), both of the target colour as well as the nouns frog and river, as opposed to collectively grouping "Animals" and "Bodies of water" or "Places to live" in another lesson. Grouping things in a textbook or lesson is perhaps still useful in form of review and this is not to suggest that Eastern learners can't be instructed taxonomically however; It would seem clear that using a "relationship-based instruction model" would have far greater success in the teaching of English to Asian students ... When a Japanese mother sits down to play with her child, she speaks mostly in relationship words (Fernald ft Morikawa, 1993; Nisbett 2003), "I give the vroom vroom to you. Now, give it to me. Thank you." An American parent would be more inclined to talk with object words "Here's the car. It has nice wheels" (Nisbett, 2003). Relationships become very fundamental in Asian thinking and influence a great deal of the way their world is created, where European/ Americans tend to be prepared for a world of objects. In tests (Ji et al, 2004; Nisbett, 2003) both Western and Eastern subjects were shown pictures of a chicken and grass and were asked to group them with a cow. Most westerners have tended to group the chicken and the cow, and justifying their answers by thinking taxonomically, (both are animals); yet most Eastern subjects would group the cow and grass, thinking via relationships (cows eat grass). One possible solution would be to take words and concepts and evenly spread them across the game i.e. level 1 will teach "red", level 2 will teach "green", level 3 will teach "blue." This, however, would be both a nightmare for the curricular designer to keep track of for every concept and for the game designer to construct genuinely engaging contexts for eliciting language-need from the player. Alternatively, rather 'Does in this picture there is four astronauts?' other-fronting: Stage 4 Stage 5 Stage 6 'Is the picture has two planets on top?' Inversion in wh- +copula and 'yes/no' questions wh- + copula: 'Where is the sun?' Auxiliary other than 'do' in 'yes/no' questions: 'Is there a fish in the water?' Inversion in wh- questions inverted wh-questions with 'do': 'How do you say [proche]?' inverted wh- questions with auxiliaries other than 'do': 'What's the boy doing?' Complex Questions question tag: 'It's better, isn't it?" negative question: 'Why can't you go?' embedded question: 'Can you tell me what the date is today' While it may be possible for a stage 1 student to memorize all the rules necessary to pass a test for stage 6, this know'ledge generally does not enter into their everyday "interlanguage" and is frequently forgotten soon after. Curricular materials attempting to dictate how and when students will acquire a particular concept have largely failed (Lightbown and Spada 1999), and video games should not expect to achieve this either. Rather, by distributing various game tasks requiring concepts such as question formation throughout the length of a curriculum, we allow students to progress from each stage to the next as their internal system is ready to do so. One proven mechanism for spreading the acquisition of complex linguistic material through the duration of a game is to progressively require more difficult forms of responses from players. For example, a game might be designed in which players at level 1 only overhear more advanced constructions, such as question formation, but are not actually required to use them in any way. They vvould not have to start using them until a later level, say level 3, when they would be required to respond to questions but not ask (Ellis 2003: 43). Then in level 5 they might be placed on a team where they work together to perform tasks that require correct production of questions. Not until level 7 would they actually be required to form questions on their own. In this way, players could progress from level to level through the game without being penalized for not having completely mastered receptive and productive skills; if they do master a concept early, they would be rewarded through means other than level progression (e.g., by social recognition from their teammates). #7 Assessment should intelligently track free production tasks throughout the game, not simply measure controlled production during test events If we accept that making mistakes is a natural part language learning, and that "The idea that what you teach is what they learn, and when you teach it is when they learn it, is not just simplistic, but wrong" (Doughty & Long, 2003, above) then the most immediate challenge for curricular designers is to come up with a coherent assessment strategy. Assessment is further complicated by the fact that mistakes are often signs of progress. For example, parents of children learning English know that they begin by using the vvord "went" correctly, but then later, start using "goed" instead, generalizing from the regular past participle formation. Some parents might be alarmed at this and try, unsuccessfully, to teach their kids to say "went" again. Most, however simply find it cute, and sure enough, without any specific intervention, the child will naturally resume using "went" correctly again. In adult second language learning the picture is considerably more complicated. While some errors may be part of a natural progression, others can be unique to a learner's particular situation, and need to be addressed explicitly. Over time, skilled teachers will usually have a sense of where each of their students is in their language learning. With a computer system, however, this becomes extremely difficult, as we lose all affective and other means of understanding a student beyond simple algorithmic calculations. Although the gaming environment may be incompatible with many of the traditional ways of evaluating student progress, it also makes available new forms of assessment. It is therefore critical that we identify each of the different assessment possibilities available to us and use them to our advantage. First and foremost, a teacher can only assess a limited amount of content along a limited number of criteria. In cases where teachers are overwhelmed by the number of students they have, assessment often gets reduced to checking to see if a student can correctly construct a sentence with a particular language feature or not. Yet, it is almost never the case that a student's knowledge can be measured in absolute terms, all or nothing, right or wrong. Some theorists (Schmidt, 1990) observe that even if two students make the same mistake, the one who is able to notice his mistake is significantly further along in the learning process than the one who can't (see also Dynamic Assessment, e.g., Lantolf & Thorne, 2006: 327-357). Consequently, game designers should find ways to discern if a player is aware of the nature of the mistake. If so, the game's feedback mechanisms can give partial reward to the player for having achieved that much, while at the same time, providing contingent feedback so that he or she can do better. As noted in the prior principle, students can reach a point at which they understand a language feature when they hear it in conversation, but are not yet able to produce it on their own. Many theorists argue that, for early learners, this may be a more important milestone than the ability to produce the target feature (Krashen & Terrell 1983). Regardless of which is more important, players can certainly be rewarded in a game for reaching such a level of understanding. Further on in the learning process, players may actually be able to produce the target language correctly, but only in certain contexts and may be unable to use it productively in others. This level of ability is of little real-world use, but is the level that is most commonly tested in traditional classrooms (Norris & Ortega, 2000). Rather than stopping at this point, game assessment systems should continue tracking and rewarding players as they further their language competency. For example, at a more advanced stage, players might be able to productively use a target language feature across a number of contexts, but only while concentrating on the use of that target feature. In a final stage, students would be able to comfortably and spontaneously incorporate a new concept into their everyday speaking and writing. This is by far the most important measure of mastery, yet it is also the hardest to assess in a traditional environment and therefore often overlooked. In a game environment, however, assessment systems can run in the background, adjusting to every action a player takes. This, of course, needs to be balanced with giving the players the freedom-to-fail and make mistakes - even on purpose. But it opens the possibility of recognizing when a player has exhibited sufficient spontaneous language use to demonstrate true mastery. Policy Implications Relevant Research For teachers who are used to evaluating Assessment that highlights ecological validity- meaning students through timed, free-standing tests approaches with direct linkages between the language given to groups of students together, learning context and language assessment process - assessment in a gaming environment will are highly relevant to the tracking of language require a considerable shift. Good teachers development in gaming environments. Assessment of make continuous, informal judgments about this sort would include examinations of language students' progress, adjusting their teaching production data from participants while they are to remedy perceived problems. Testing engaged in "naturally occurring" in-game then, is a way of confirming such judgments communication. Examples are analysis of the use of so as to provide objective data for grading synchronous chat tools that serve to help players and administrative decisions. With coordinate group activity, essays or other prose writing communicative learning of all kinds, and done to flesh out a character and his or her role in a particularly with learning in a game game based narrative, or voice communication using environment where there is no fixed text and VoIP that is concurrent with coordinated group game no fixed repertoire of features, teachers play. Computational tools and corpus linguistic have to find ways to quantify their informal techniques have been used extensively for such assessments with different kinds of purposes. Recent corpus-informed assessment and measures, not just by projecting from pedagogy projects have had learners compare corpus components of the communicative act data from expert speakers with that from learners, (grammatical patterns, translation, etc.), but including their own production (what Seidlhofer (2002) also by examining the actual communicative terms 'learner-driven data'). There are many benefits to process. At the local level - classroom exposing learners to both expert and learner corpora testing - students will have to demonstrate and corpora-based materials, including the opportunity their abilities in interviews, presentations or to notice the differences between their own and expert other activities that show their ability to use production, and to negotiate and interact with other language in communicative settings. They students, teachers, and experts during the learning will also need to be evaluated periodically in process. Recent corpus-based studies have global terms, so that they know their demonstrated how learners were able to develop progress on a general scale, and so awareness of the pragmatic consequences of their own programs can evaluate the effectiveness of usage (Vyatkina & Belz, 2006) and to experience their teaching and make appropriate policy "technology-enhanced rhetorical consciousness raising" decisions. (Lee & Swales, 2006: 72). #8 Consider the Full Range of Gaming Platforms Available Thirty-five years ago, video games were confined to dedicated arcade centers in which players would feed coins into machines every few minutes in order to take a turn on a particular game. This limited the development of video games at that time to very specific forms: those that could be played in as short an amount of time as possible, while still enticing players to want to keep playing and pumping in coins. A complex strategy game requiring hundreds of teammates to spend days planning and coordinating a single move, for example, would have been entirely out of the question. Today our stereotypical notion of what a video game is often resembles what was the only possibility a decade ago: a relatively lengthy, self-contained experience to be packaged on a cd-rom and distributed to players. Yet, with today's technologies, the possible forms that a game can take are endless: it can be a five minute game; it can be a never- ending game that is being programmed as the players play it; it can be played on a complex virtual reality headset; it can be played on a cell phone; it can be played alone; or it can be played collaboratively with half a million players. Going forward, it will be useful to identify the relative strengths and weaknesses each video game form but also for their larger impact on the learner's relation to the language (interest and the desire to pursue language learning autonomously). Video games provide language curriculum designers with opportunities not only to deliver traditional learning content in a highly efficient manner, but also to present the learner with an experience that specifically engages a particular student's interests. For example, consider the use of songs in foreign language classrooms. Currently, a teacher looking to build a lesson around a song must select a song, incorporate it in a lesson plan, and deliver that lesson personally to the students. Choosing which song to use poses a dilemma, since students do not all have the same musical tastes. So if the teacher chooses the latest Britney Spears song, some students may love it and learn much from it; others, however, may hate it, and learn nothing from it or lose interest in the class. In the end, teachers often give up trying to please their students and end up simply choosing whatever appeals to them, as teachers. By contrast, consider a video games such as Audio Surf. Here the player pilots a space ship through an obstacle course, picking up strategic objects. Before entering the space ship, however, the player is asked to choose a song from their own mp3 collection, right there on the hard drive. The game doesn't simply makes that song the background music for the game, it generates the entire race course and sets the obstacle positions on the basis of a waveform analysis of the song. In this way, the most intense moments in the game are perfectly synchronized vvith the downbeats in the song, and the entire experience feels as though it was meticulously crafted just for that specific song. Twenty years ago, virtually all video games had a prescribed path which all players traveled along through the arc of the game, sometimes with the possibility of a few branching choices. Today, most of the top selling games are thought of as open-ended playgrounds where players pick and choose which activities they want to play: one player in The Sims 2 may try to build the grandest house in the neighborhood, while another might focus on narrating a story about their character. One player in World of Warcraft may spend hours orchestrating the simultaneous efforts of 39 other players in order to kill a grand boss-monster, while another may spend their time individually hunting down the ingredients necessary to bake a pie. One player in Civilization JV may try to vvin by decimating opponents, some of whom may in turn be trying to win by building a culturally flourishing civilization or space colony. By designing language learning games that adapt to students' agentive choices and actions, we have the potential continue their interest in learning the language far beyond the length of the game we develop. For example, if we design a game in which the learning objectives were created around song lyrics chosen by the students themselves, we open up the possibility they will continue to listen to that song in their own free time and use it to re-enforce their learning. While a similar approach could be taken vvith other foreign language media artifacts (comics, television, etc.), connections to other video games would seem the most natural fit for continued autonomous learning. For example, if the objective of a language learning game is for the student to be able to play a separate entertainment video game in the foreign language that appeals to them, this should be recognized as a far greas great an accomplishment as the acquisition of the words and phrases needed to reach this goal. #10 Where possible, multiplayer games should provide players with meaningful and distinct roles The emergence of the internet over the past two decades has fundamentally transformed the potential of numerous fields. Video games and language Theoretical Considerations The use of Internet technologies to encourage dialogue between distributed individuals and learning are no exception. With over a billion people representing nearly a thousand languages digitally interconnected with one another, the internet might seem like an instant panacea for language learning difficulties. However, initial attempts to simply link students who want to know each other's language, expecting them to learn from one another, has had mixed results. More recently, more creative and successful uses of Internet-mediated intercultural interaction for language learning have emerged (Furstenberg et al. 2001; contributions to Belz & Thorne (eds.), 2006). Central to such projects is the partner classes proposes a compelling shift in second language (L2) education, one that moves learners away from simulated classroom-based contexts and toward actual interaction with expert speakers of the language they are studying. Internet-mediated intercultural foreign language education is premised on the notion that dialogue and other forms of interaction can foster productive, and perhaps even necessary, conditions for developing intercultural communicative competence (see Belz & Thorne, 2006; Thorne, idea that the link between partners with different languages needs to be clearly organized and directed 2003, 2006). Rather than focusing towards concrete goals, such as exploring cultural from its use in interpersonal interaction, this approach emphasizes the use of Internet differences and similarities, so that target language linguistic behavior is made visible, problematized and/or made more nuanced, and eventually internalized. Consider Rebecca Black's (2005) account of the Cardcaptor Sakura section of the popular community site fanfiction.net. Although the site was not originally designed for language learning, it serves as a nexus in which American kids interested in learning about Asian culture mentor Asian kids interested in developing their English language skills and vice versa. Here fans of the popular anime series Cardcaptor Sakura come together to write and share their own fictional stories set within the Cardcaptor Sakura universe. All of the stories are written in English, yet the Cardcaptor Sakura universe is based on Asian culture. Thus, each participant comes to the site with either linguistic or cultural expertise which complements the needs of another participant, making all their interactions meaningful, developmentally productive, and inherently bi-directional. At the same time, while curricular designers have been working to find innovative uses of web technologies to facilitate language learning, game designers have been extending the capabilities of their games, and have opened up entirely new genres of video game. Consider the game, Savage 2: Two teams, of roughly 15 players each, work to build a base for themselves while simultaneously fighting to destroy the other team's stronghold. Most of the players on the team predominantly on language in relative isolation communication tools to support dialogue, debate, collaborative research, and social interaction between geographically dispersed participants. But the goal is loftier than social interaction per se and builds on the hypothesis, described by communication researcher Joseph Walther (1992, 1996), that Internetmediated relationships have the potential to be hyperpersonal and can involve more intensely frenetic interaction than those which occur in face-to-face settings. This now self-evident potential of computer-mediated communication lies at the heart of most internet-mediated intercultural foreign language learning projects - the aspiration for participants to develop meaningful relationships with one another and to use the language they are studying to do so. Within the Vygotskian framework (e.g., 1978, 1986), developmental progress involves actively resolving contradictions through a process of changes in the locus of control necessary to regulate thinking and action. Object-regulation indicates instances when artifacts in the environment regulate or afford cognition/activity. Other-regulation describes mediation by an expert or more capable peer. Self-regulation indexes an action that an individual can accomplish with minimal or no external assistance. Each of these regulation play from the perspective of an individual solider on dynamics can involve either human mediation the ground. However, one player on each team plays (such as was the case in this example of the game from an entirely different perspective: that of a commander overseeing the troops from a birds-eye camera. The core of the game then consists of computer-mediated discussion) or support from soldiers on the ground working to relay information from their unique perspective back to the commander player in order to find weak points in the opposing environmental sources such as design features of a gaming environment (for SLA related applications of this approach, see Lantolf & Thorne, 2006, 2007). team's defenses and vice-versa. One popular task often featured in foreign language curricula today is the "information gap" task: students seek information from each other in order to complete a task. David Nunan (2005) gives the following example, in which students are each given a table showing when their friends are free and when they are busy. Their task is to ask questions so they can determine when their friends are free to go an see a movie. Thus students initiate interchanges such as the following: "Is Karen free Sunday afternoon?" "No, she's going shopping" Student A Friday Evening Bob Saturday Afternoon Working Saturday Sunday Evening Afternoon Prepare Meet boss at Late for a meeting airport Karen Philip Go Shopping Free Free Free Joan Sunday Evening Free Baking Take car to garage Cookies Student B Friday Evening Bob Saturday Afternoon Saturday Sunday Evening Afternoon Go to Sunday Evening Free meeting Karen Clean Free Go to visit aunt apartment in hospital Philip Play tennis Study for exam Joan Free Go to concert Free While many theorists have recognized the value of information gap tasks in language instruction (Prahbu, 1987), most feel there is much room for improvement. Pica and Doughty ( 1985b: 246, cited in Ellis, 2005), in a study that tried to determine the sort of classroom format that would best facilitate information gap activities, concluded that "neither a teacher-fronted nor a group format can have any impact on negotiation as long as these tasks continue to provide little motivation for participants to access each other's views." The example task above, while certainly a task one might encounter in everyday life, is not one people usually engage in for entertainment purposes. Rather it is one most people only do when they really are trying to arrange a time for friends to see a movie together. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that some students find little motivation in performing what might otherwise be considered a chore - but in an unfamiliar language. By contrast, many of the tasks players undertake in order to complete a video game are initiated by real needs to communicate information between players. In fact, the tasks are, by definition, designed to be so engaging that players are willing to do them in their free time. Curricular designers can capitalize on the enthusiasm for such activities by identifying existing game mechanics that naturally encourage students to collaborate, and then incorporating those experiences into a larger pedagogical framework. Genres As the capabilities and possibilities for video games have evolved, the medium has developed numerous distinctive genres, each with their own conventions. Within each genre, it is important that we consider the relative strengths and weaknesses each holds in relation to language learning. Puzzle Adventure Games Easiest genre to deploy in a classroom environment, 'Nith plenty of games already in existence. Puzzle adventure games such as Grim Fandango, The Curse of Monkey Island or Sam and Max are the easiest games for teachers to bring into their classrooms. In these games, players take the role of the protagonist in a story in which they interact with a variety of characters to solve mysteries and puzzles. In a classroom setting, teachers can simply project the game to the front of the classroom, then have the students tell them how to direct the protagonist. By giving commands to the teacher, students have opportunities to practice imperative forms, the copious dialogs leaves numerous openings for teachers to break down and explain new language in a natural manner, and the puzzle tasks give students chances to debate possible solutions among themselves. The fact that these games only require a single computer and a projector dramatically reduces the technical requirements. Another plus is that most titles in this genre have unobjectionable content. Their low learning curve and high narrative content make these games compelling to wide audiences and to nongamers. Simulation Games Most flexible for deploying existing games in a Integrating gaming with formal education: Bridging activities as a language awareness foreign language pedagogy framework Just beyond the tech-sex appeal and monitor halos rest the same issues and questions that have confronted teachers and researchers for decades (and millennia): What will (or should) students learn? How are the task and situation structured? How are students to demonstrate new media savvy and how will this be measured and evaluated? At the same time, as reproduction of analog epistemology and classroom hierarchy flourishes in this new era of digital education (witness many of the precisely modeled simulacra of educational settings within Second Life, for example), in other quarters, implicit understandings of the representation, expression, and organization of knowledge and discourse become problematic, as Internet-mediated realities challenge the adequacy of conventional classroom practices, in part because formal educational contexts and objectives often have limited relevance to the immediate, and mediated, social, communicative, and informational needs of classroom setting One video game genre particularly well suited for beginning learners in classroom settings is simulation games. Here players are placed in charge of managing a complex system - e.g. running a city, directing an ant colony or operating an amusement park. Ironically, the best selling computer game of all time is one in which players simulate ordinary everyday life. In The Sims, players first create a virtual family by specifying physical attributes, clothing and personalities for a set of family members. Next, they are given a budget for constructing a house for the family to live in. Once they have moved the family into the new house, players essentially author a story about the lives of that family. Described as a "virtual doll house" (Wright 2003), The Sims requires players to balance the wants and needs of their characters while helping them to advance their personal lives: finding jobs, making friends and improving their capabilities. In the process, players direct their characters through daily tasks such as washing dishes, cleaning the bathroom and relaxing by the television. With its focus on everyday activities, The Sims series turns out to match up surprisingly well with the content of typical introductory foreign language classes (parts of the body, parts of the house, professions, etc). Rather than having to use the 'edutainment' language learning video games currently available, many instructors have opted simply to use the foreign language versions of mainstream games in their classrooms. For example, Felix Kronenberg has students in his German class use The Sims 2 to generate stories in German about the lives of the characters they create (2007). Similarly, Mylene Catel (2008) imports characters from her French literature class into the game, then directs her students to use the game to author extensions to the story world by playing out the everyday lives of those characters. Richard Sanford and his colleagues (2006) report on similar experiences with French teachers throughout the U.K. Others (Miller & Hegelheimer 2006; Ranalli 2007) use the game in ESL classes to stimulate interest in reading and to expand learners' vocabularies. Purushotma (2006) describes how the students. Online multiplayer games are massively popular, with some games involving millions of players worldwide (e.g., World of Warcraft, Blizzard Entertainment). As discussed throughout this paper, gaming environments have been shown to provide opportunities for immersion in distinctive linguistic, cultural, and task-based settings that have tremendous potential as sites for designed experience and learning (see Barab, Arici, & Jackson, 2005; Gee, 2003; Squire, 2003, 2006; Steinkeuhler, 2004) and for language learning in particular (Purushotma, 2006; Sykes, 2008; Thorne, 2008a). An array of specific literacy practices are associated with such games that utilize language and other in-game semiosis to develop strong "projective" identities, defined as long-term and usually consistent identities that players project onto their in-game characters (Gee, 2005). However, integrating gaming-based language activity into traditional educational curricula and institutions poses a number of challenges. To enhance possibilities for agentive language use by foreign language students, one pedagogical proposal, called "bridging activities" (see Thorne & Reinhardt, 2008; Thorne, 2009), is to have students themselves select and bring in non-traditional examples of communicative interaction or texts - for example, online discussions and chat logfiles relating to game play - that they find to be interesting, puzzling, or are curious about. With appropriate teacher assistance, the next step would be to stylistically analyze the texts, asking - "why do certain texts and textual or discourse conventions work well (with a given audience, context, and purpose) and others not?" Following this, a comparison can be made between the gaming texts and genreapproximate analog text types produced for school or mainstream media distribution, asking - "what are the patterns of effective language use in gaming environments? How are these game can be modified to include built-in language learning content. With their inherently open-ended texts linguistically and stylistically realized? In \A/hat ways does language use in the service nature and direct relevance to everyday phenomena, goal-directed activity within a game differ from simulation games (along with puzzle adventure games) conventional classroom discourse?" In practice, are probably the easiest video game genre to deploy both teachers and students would engage with for classroom-based language learning. Since many of these questions and attempt to develop the games are already available on the commercial market, little or no programming resources bridging activities that minimally serve two functions: 1) to highlight attention to linguistic would be needed to create games in this genre that are suitable for language learning. Like puzzle and rhetorical form as they relate to the production of meaning and/or social actions, an adventure games, only the production of curricular development and teacher training materials would be important aspect of language use in most all situations, and 2) to increase the practical needed to deploy such games on a wider scale. relevance and contemporary currency of Virtual Pet Social Sims foreign language materials and opportunities for engagement. This represents a move that, Easiest genre for developing games for young children under ideal conditions, provides vivid, context At the same time that the original The Sims game was situated, and temporally immediate interaction with "living" language use. Bridging activities being developed, in 1999, two college students were are not intended to be a replacement for designing Neopets, a game world in \Nhich fellow standard texts, reference grammars, and students could create virtual pets and play with them assessment tools. Rather, they are meant to online. Their stated goal was to "keep university provide a realia counter-weight to the students entertained, and possibly make some cash prescriptivist versions of grammar, style, and from banner advertising" (Headon 2002, Grimes & vocabulary in foreign language texts that Shade 2005). By 2003, the site had grown to accommodate 50 million players worldwide with over 2 billion page vie\IVS per month (Grimes & site in a deal valued at $160 million. Ultimately it typically are not based upon actual language use (for exceptions, see Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 2000; Thorne, Reinhardt, & Golombek, 2008). The pedagogical impetus for has grown to over 150 million players, racking in over this approach includes the following: Shade 2005). Two years later, Viacom purchased the a half trillion page vie\IVS (Neopets 2008). • To improve understanding of both More recently a similar site, Club Penguin, was conventional and internet-mediated text purchased by Disney in a deal valued at $700 million. Like The Sims, the everyday routine tasks genres, emphasizing the concept that specific linguistic choices are associated found in these games make them highly amenable to TBLT pedagogy (feeding/clothing your pet, finding with desired social-communicative actions; them jobs, building them a place to live, etc). Unlike The Sims series, their comparatively simpler graphics would greatly reduce a development budget for those looking to create games specifically for foreign language learning. Their highly social nature and the numerous possibilities for players to interact with others from all over the world make them a rich ground for language learning, even outside of the classroom. While popular across all ages and both genders, cf. 39% < 12 years, 40% between 13-17 years, 21% > 18 • To raise awareness of genre specificity (\Nhy certain text types work well for specific purposes) and context-appropriate language use; • To build metalinguistic, metacommunicative, and analytic skills that enable lifelong learning in the support of participation in existing and future genres of plurilingual and transcultural language use; • To bridge toward relevance to students' powerful catalysts for engaging them in extensive foreign language conversations. Additionally, webbased strategy games can be highly engaging and popular, yet still remain easy to access and relatively inexpensive to develop. For example, the popular site Travian.com features nearly a million active users across numerous countries and languages, yet the core was programmed by Gerhard MOiier, a 22-year old chemical engineering student at the Technical University of Munich (Galaxy News 2005). On the English version, participants from all over the world engineer complex alliances to ensure the prosperity of their city. Because those who are able to form alliances across linguistic boundaries have a distinct advantage, players are willing to expend considerable effort tutoring alliance members so they can understand the various forms of communication taking place within an alliance. Such games could easily be incorporated in a mid-advanced level classroom where students report on and aid one another in their interactions with players from the target country. MMORPG- Massively multiplayer online role playing game Most comprehensive genre for high-budget development While they are also the most challenging to implement successfully, MMORPGs likely hold the greatest range and potential for designing an immersive language learning environment. It is also important to keep in mind that the term "MMORPG" can be applied to a number of vastly different games. At the top end, an MMORPG like World of Warcraft carries a development price tag of $60 million (Koster 2006) and would be far too expensive to duplicate with the specific purpose of learning a foreign language. This is especially true when one considers that fact that the research and development needed to make any game effective for language teaching multiplies its design budget considerably. There are, however, numerous suggestions and reports focused on adopting and adapting existing topend MMORPGs to be used within language learning environments (Byrant 2007, Roy 2007, Thorne 2008a). To present one example, Thorne (2008a) describes an impromptu dialogue between two World of Warcraft gamers, one American and the other Ukranian. Both are battling computer-generated foes in the same area, when the Ukranian sends the following message to the American: "ti russkij slychajno ?", to which the American replies with a question mark. Approximately 150 lines of dialogue ensue that include introductions, statements of real world location, discussion of game strategy, common interests in music, and attempts at using Russian by the American (with the help of solicited "just in time" messages from a Russian speaking friend via Instant Messenger). The matrix language for this interaction was English but three languages (including multiple uses of Russian and one instance of a Latin aphorism) were used in total. From a language learning perspective, the conversation was natural and unconstrained by the fabricated (if also developmentally useful) patterns that characterize much instructional setting language use. The transcript shows reciprocal alternations in expert-novice status such that both participants provided language-specific explicit corrections, made requests for linguistic assistance, and collaboratively assembled successful repair sequences. From an ethnomethodological perspective, the social order illustrated by this pair provides significant opportunities for both producing new knowiedge and refining existing knowiedge about language use, as well as refining World of Warcraft game strategy. In a follow-up conversation , the American studentexpressed strong interest in studying Russian, in part to improve his World of Warcraft in-game experience with Russian speakers. He also reported that another student in his dorm, a highly enthusiastic gamer, had already begun to study Chinese with the primary goal of more fully participating in Chinese language-mediated game play. As an alternative to using existing MMORPGs or developing a top-end foreign language specific MMORPG from scratch, a number of services are emerging that enable developers to create such games at dramatically lower costs by providing them with pre-assembled pieces of a virtual world which they can then stitch together to suit their specific needs. Services like metaplace.com allow for a variety of platforms, including web-based and embeddable games, while services like multiverse.net, opencroquet.org and projectdarkstar.org allow developers to easily construct 3D worlds with virtual avatars. Sykes (2008), for example, describes the use of croquet (opencroquet.org) to develop a foreign language specific Synthetic lmmersive Environment (SIE) designed for the learning of Spanish pragmatics. The game, Croquelandia (croquet.umn.edu), integrates many features creatively appropriated from commercial online games to produce explicit, educationally-related outcomes. In Croquelandia, learners engage a variety of goal-directed activities (quests) designed to provide behavior-based corrective feedback through interaction with Non-Player Characters (NPCs), native speakers, and other group members. Interaction within this SIE carries the ultimate goal of enhancing learners' ability to deal with various pragmatic features of L2 Spanish. Initial learner perception and outcome data suggest a positive effect for the use of SIEs for the development of L2 pragmatic awareness (Sykes, 2008; Sykes, Oskoz, & Thorne, 2008). Alternate Reality Games -ARG On July 16th 2004, a number of popular website owners received mysterious packages at their doorstep (Szulborski, 2005). The packages were ostensibly from a company named "Margaret's Honey" and included a sample bottle of honey from the company. Included with the honey was a series of cutout letters, including the letters "B", "I", "L", "O", "S", "V' and three letter "E's". After trying various arrangements, a number of the recipients noticed that they could be arranged to form the sentence "I Love Bees", which prompted them, in turn, to try looking up "ilovebees.com." There was, indeed, such a website, and it turned out to display a page for 'Margaret's Honey'. But the site appeared to have been hacked, with strange messages appearing on it: HALT - MODULE CORE HEMORRHAGE Control has been yielded to the SYSTEM PERIL DISTRIBUTED REFLEX This medium is classified, and has a STRONG INTRUSIVE INCLINATION. In 5 days, network throttling will erode. In 19 days this medium will metastasize. COUNTDOWN TO WIDE AWAKE AND PHYSICAL: 32:15:38:10:831 Make your decisions accordingly. At the end of the webpage was an appeal from Dana, ostensibly Margaret's niece, asking visitors to help her figure out what was wrong with the website. Many recipients then posted entries on their biogs asking readers to help them track down the cause of the hacks to Dana's website. Some of those readers noticed that the images on the website were scrambled in systematic patterns; ultimately they turned out to hold encoded messages within them. Rather than answers, however, those messages contained other, even more perplexing messages that brought viewers even deeper into the world of I Love Bee's, requiring them to invite even more friends to help. Ultimately, I Love Bee's swelled to include over 600,000 players world wide, making it one of the largest pools of collective intelligence assembled for one of history's most challenging scavenger hunts. As the game unfolded, clues lead players to a series of GPS coordinates and time codes. Each of the GPS coordinates corresponded to one of 40,000 payphones scattered across the 50 U.S. states and across 8 countries. These would ring at a specified time. Through the network of 600,000 players, and with effective use of various communication technologies, players were able to identify places and relay instructions to players near key payphones scattered across the globe, all within 20 seconds of notification (McGonigal 2005). Answering the payphones, players received 15 second fragments of a 6 hour radio drama, which they then reconstructed on the web. At no time in the course of the events triggered by the arrival of packages from the Margaret's Honey Company was the activity clearly categorized as a game. Players did not open up a game application to enter a 3D-rendered world, then close it down when they were finished. The technologies used were familiar (biogs, wikis, websites, etc) and were geared to solving real-world problems and challenges. So how did 600,000 players find the game interesting enough for then to invest their free-time in learning how to use everyday technologies? The director of I Love Bees described the core mandate of his game design philosophy as "to create puzzles and challenges that no single person could solve on their own." (McGonigal 2007). By effectively using web collaboration technologies, players learned how to function as part of teams larger than anyone has been part of before, to solve problems more complicated than human beings had ever been able to solve before. In The Beast, a similar game often described as the precursor to I Love Bees, the original designers started with what they estimated to be 30 days worth of content, ranging from what they thought would be "super-easy" to a degree of difficulty so high that "they're going to have to beg us at the end of 30 days to give them hints." Making effective use of collaboration technologies, the first group of players to stumble upon the game completed everything within the first day. From that day on, the designers were in a non-stop scramble to simply throw out the most difficult problems they could imagine (McGonigal 2005). In the last ten years "WebQuests," that is, activities designed by teachers "in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet" (Dodge 1997), have exploded in popularity in schools. According to Google Adsense, search popularity for the term "WebQuest" is now approaching that of the term "lesson plan" (Purushotma 2006). In a typical WebQuest, students are given a scenario which requires them to extract information or images from a series of recommended websites and then to compile their findings into a final report. For example, students might be told they are part of a team of experts brought in to decide on the most appropriate method for disposing of a canister of nuclear waste. They are then provided with a list of websites relevant to waste disposal, and asked to present a final proposal to the teacher. While WebQuests provide a popular theoretical framework for extracting information from new-media sources, there has been little innovation about what to do with the information - other than to use it as the basis of a report. For most students, a WebQuest assignment is an exercise in "overly structured clicking and reading" (Dodge 2005). Quite simply, while many theorists and teachers love WebQuests for their ability to connect students with varied and interesting information directly from the target culture, students themselves are less impressed. The creator of the term "WebQuest", Bernie Dodge, comments as follovvs (2005): "It's true that most WebQuests are boring, but I think that's because they aren't really well designed, not because they don't have flashy graphics and interactivity. I'd like to think that getting engaged in a problem that requires synthesis and problem-solving is motivating in a deep and useful way that goes beyond Prensky's arcade-game type learning." If we look closely at the design of Alternate Reality Games, at the core they are, essentially, extremely well designed WebQuests that require synthesis, problem-solving and collaboration of large community of people. Because most ARGs have been financed for the purpose of promoting a commercial product, they have received little attention within the education community. But they do suggest invaluable models for educators and researchers looking to progress beyond the limits of current WebQuest activities, particularly for language educators looking to introduce students to websites from the target culture. Language Learning and Video Games The demographics of Internet-user populations show phenomenal expansion around the world, approaching 1.3 billion individuals as of December, 2007 (as measured by internetworldstats.com). Alongside the burgeoning numbers of Internet users comes a parallel growth in quantity and variety of mediated expression, the everyday forms of participation in civic, professional, and social life, and perhaps most profoundly, the emergence of entirely new social formations that have surfaced only in, and through, Internet mediation (for discussions, see Jenkins, 2006; Thorne & Black, 2007). In this paper, we have suggested that L2 education is entering a particularly critical stage that is marked by an urgent need to examine (and create) gaming environments that are not only learning tools, but which also serve as critical contemporary arenas for task-relevant communication and relationship building. Internetmediated communication is no longer a supplement to, or practice arena for, communication in everyday life. Instead of merely simulating other modes of interaction, technology-mediated communication is, in and of itself, the real thing that operates as a critically important medium for all manners of human interaction. These conditions raise questions as to how researchers and language educators might orient themselves to the changing contexts of mediated language use, as well as to which genres and communication tools should be included in instructed second language (L2) curricula. The above descriptions of gaming and new media communication attempts to balance the resources and performance potentials of goaldirected gaming environments with the knowledge bases, analytic traditions, and conceptual-theoretical frameworks that the institution of foreign language education can provide. To be clear, we are advocating an approach designed to engender engagement through the utilization of students' digital-literacy expertise and/or gaming experience or interest, but we seek also to provide encouragement for the development of gaming environments that provide feedback at the level of linguistic form and exposure to and movement toward awareness, and eventually mastery, of a wide range of communication genres, including those associated most closely with traditional literacies and "power genres" text conventions. To achieve this, we advocate the use of a three point sequence when designing video games: genuine player need, linguistic support and creative feedback. Additionally, we argue lingustic support should be provided within a three-layered presentation offering meaning-only focused tasks, multimedia focus-on-form, then meta-linguistic descriptions and conceptual treatments of forms. The brief examples of gaming and new media literacies presented in this paper also precipitate a number of challenges to the conventional goals and processes of foreign language education, such as the rigidity of the gate keeping mechanisms of high stakes testing that recognize only analog genres, the disconnect between the prescriptivist epistemology of schooling and language use that is appropriate and even necessary for full participation in other contexts (Internet-mediated and otherwise). In an age marked by transcultural and hybrid genres of communication, and in a global arena where in some quarters, "plurilingualism" is already fronted as the goal of foreign language education (witness the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages), these issues will increase in intensity and complexity and must necessarily inform the foreign language educational frameworks of the future. References